NFS Services Administrator's Guide

Troubleshooting NFS Services
Common Problems with NIS
Chapter 8308
If a User Cannot Log In
❏ If the user has recently changed passwords, ask the user to try
logging in with the old password. If the user can log in using the old
password, follow these steps:
1. Issue the ps -ef command on the NIS master server to make
sure the yppasswdd daemon is running. If it is not, issue the
following command to start all the NIS server processes:
/sbin/init.d/nis.server start
2. Check the cron scripts on the slave servers to make sure
transfers of the passwd map from the master server are frequent
enough. Once per hour is usually frequent enough, but frequent
map transfers may cause too much network traffic. You might
want to schedule map transfers for late at night, and advise
users to make their password changes just before they go home.
❏ Issue the following command on the NIS client to determine which
master server supplies the passwd map to the client:
/usr/bin/ypwhich -m passwd
If the server does not respond, see “If You Receive an NIS “Server
Not Responding” Message” on page 307.
If the ypwhich command returns the name of the NIS master server,
log in as root to the master server and make sure the user has an
entry in its /etc/passwd file. Then, issue the following commands on
the master server to generate the NIS passwd database from the
/etc/passwd file and push it to the NIS slave servers:
cd /var/yp
/usr/ccs/bin/make passwd
❏ Issue the domainname command (with no arguments) to make sure
the client’s default domain is the domain served by the NIS master
server. If it is not, log in as root to the NIS client, and issue the
following command to change its domain name:
domainname domainname
❏ Issue the following command to check whether the NIS client has an
entry in the passwd database on the NIS server to which it is bound:
/usr/bin/ypmatch username passwd